Week Three and more GMT!

July 13th, 2010

Well, a fourth of my internship is completed. Time is just cruising along! I have a great book on marine geophysics and I’ve been reading about the corrections made to raw magnetic and gravity field data and learning about the instrumentation we will be using on our cruise. Since I have been looking at datasets and mapping, I figure I should know what I’m working with and how it is collected.

Most of the week I have been datum hunting! I looked at databases for magnetic and gravity field ship track data and added to my maps. I went a little cross-eyed after staring at the computer for hours. (A small price for thorough and complete data!) I think I have exhausted most of my online resources so *fingers crossed* my gravity and magnetic maps are practically finished. I have a cute script and I love awk! I have a few minor adjustments to make like adding labels to the plotted OBS stations. So to recap: I have ship track maps of the free-air gravity field and residual magnetic field of the area we will be deploying the OBSs. I also made a low resolution but still kind of fun etopo1 topography map and a magnetic intensity map from the GeoNet data repository. The latter two maps do not have any holes in the data so they are nice to look at. I found a few additional ship tracks with raw magnetic and gravity data. I will plot them to see if they fill in any gaps in the map and check with Dr. Kohler if it is worth making the necessary corrections to add them to the final maps.

I should hopefully have final versions of magnetic and gravity field maps this upcoming week which is ahead of schedule! Yay! I will then move onto learning MB-System and plotting multi-beam bathymetry data.